Dennis Tuuri

Peace is found in the way of the Lord and the way of the Lord is revealed to us most emphatically in the words of holy scripture. Today’s sermon text will be Genesis 1:27 and 28 and Genesis 2:8-22. And when we read the Genesis 2 passage I would ask you to think about it as I read it and as you hear it as kind of a training ground for Adam and Eve as a model perhaps for training up children and also as a model in terms of some of the things that God does there to enhance and train Adam and Eve for work.

Our subject today is again work and specifically work as culture making. Please stand. The reading of God’s word. Genesis 1:27 and 28. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. Then God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Dropping down to Genesis 2:8-22, the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden and from there it parted and became four riverheads.

The name of the first is Pishon. It is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah where there is gold and the gold of that land is good. Bedellium and the onyx stone are there also. The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Hiddekel. It is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.” And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of all the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.

And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all the cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept, and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man.

Let’s pray. Lord God, help us to see this text with fresh eyes. Help us to see revealed here a system and a model for work for our own work and vocations which will call us again to tomorrow. Bless us Lord God in our continuing series to understand how our work lines up with your work. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Please be seated.

Okay. So this is the third sermon in this series so far. We began in Exodus 20 this series on work and rethinking work. You know, James B. Jordan has the book *Through New Eyes*. Toby Sumpter is going to be our speaker at family camp next year and he’ll be talking kind of on his version of *Through New Eyes*, kind of how the Bible sets up categories and ways to look at things. And what we’re trying to do is look afresh at work the significance of work. I was at a conference four or five years ago and the first talk I heard the man said, “What if our vocations are not kind of off to the side of God’s mission on the world in the earth, but what if our vocations are God’s mission in the earth?” A very thought-provoking question.

And I think that the answer to that based on the text of scripture we read today and the rest of the scriptures is indeed that our work is central to who we are. It occupies a great amount of our time. And so it seemed I actually wanted to do this sermon series for years and years and years. And Tim Keller’s book *Every Good Endeavor*, which came out last year, was the final spur to me that provided excellent material that would help me put together a sermon series for Reformation Covenant.

So, that’s what we’re doing. And we began in Exodus 20 where our work and our rest are linked to God’s work and his rest. And so, we talked about the fact that God is a worker, right? And not just in the days of creation. Jesus said that his father works and he continues to work. God’s a worker. Next week we’ll talk about work as service. And we’ll look at some of the Psalms again that we looked at in that first sermon to see the various ways that God works to provide food, for instance, to the created order and then how our work lines up with that and the significance of that for us.

But God’s a worker and we know in Exodus 20, we know from Genesis that we’re made in his image. So, we’re workers. Work isn’t some sort of necessary evil. Work existed in the garden in paradise in the account that we read today prefall. Work isn’t a result of sin and change is work. We’re kind of building in these first four or five sermons a biblical view of work. But as I said last week, we’re not going to whistle past the graveyard with a big grin on our face.

In mid-October, we’ll start looking at Ecclesiastes and we’ll look at some of the difficulties of work and the effects of the fall on work as well. And even today, we’ll look at the difficulty, the hard work that work really is. So, we talked about that. And so, God takes delight in his work. We’re to take delight in our work. The absence of the fourth commandment in nearly all of Christendom—nearly all of Christendom—the irrelevance that most people see in the fourth commandment affects us not just on the consecration of the Lord’s day, but remember, the fourth commandment begins with a command to work for six days.

In six days, do all your labor, right? And so work is at the essence as God begins to describe who we are and what we do. Work is described in the fourth word and it lines up with God’s work. He takes pleasure in his work. The rest that’s entered into in the fourth commandment that is enjoined to us must be of the similar sort of rest as at the end of the days of creation, God took delight in his labor.

And so the Lord’s day and observance of it is a direct result of our work. It also precedes our work and prepares us for work. So we talked about the relationship of us to who God is and we looked at some very specific texts of God’s work in providing all kinds of physical things. We then talked last week comparing Jerusalem and Athens, so to speak, a biblical worldview versus a Greek worldview. And we said that so often in the church, we tend to have Greek thoughts about things.

The body is bad, but the Bible says the body is good. The material world is just really a problem, but the Bible says that God created it and it was all very good. We think that heaven is some disembodied state where we’re sitting on a cloud playing a harp. At least that’s the characterization. But the Bible talks about Jesus returning to this earth and having a new heavens and a new earth. That physicality and bodies are not something to be gotten rid of as some kind of problem.

Jesus gets a new body upon his resurrection and so shall we. We’ll spend eternity with bodies. Get used to it. It’s not going to be like the Greek idea of heaven. So we compared and contrasted these things with Greek philosophy which informs a lot of who we are. And to the Greeks, most work is just a necessary evil. It’s something you don’t really want to do. And increasingly in our country, unemployment is the goal.

If we can get enough benefits going on and help from other people going on, that’s what we’re to do. And it’s almost as if we sort of look at people who have gamed the system enough or whatever they do enough to not work as somehow that’s what we want to be like. No. It is of the essence of who we are as people as human beings created in the image of God to work. Work is not a necessary evil. It is a necessary component for human flourishing.

So in the words of Keller, you know, he’s said that we would say we’ve talked about the design of work to image God’s work and the dignity of work. It’s not something demeaning. No matter how manual the labor is, it is a great delight. God—did you notice in today’s text, you might not have thought of this before—but he formed the birds out of the ground. That’s what we just read. We always think about that in terms of men, but he didn’t just speak and birds were in the air. He formed them out of the ground. He worked the ground—manual labor we could say. So, we’ve talked about the dignity of work, the design of work, the dignity of work, and today we want to say, well, okay, given those assumptions, what do we do? What is kind of what’s the job description? What are we supposed to be doing with work? Okay, we get it that we’re supposed to highly value it, but what does it have to do with my job when I go off and drive down the freeway tomorrow and go to wherever I’m going to go?

And so, what we want to do today is look at these texts before us and look at some of the specific job descriptions that are described for us didactically taught with a couple of verses but also in terms of what happens in these texts as well. What sort of work does Adam do? How does it image God? And how does that relate to who we are as well?

Now we said that you can sort of look at these verses in Genesis 2 and kind of line it out as a way to do parental care or upbringing of children. So Derek Hidner talks about this in his commentary on Genesis. And he says that among other things, we see the work is prominent in paradise. Again, we’ve made that point several times now. But he says this. He says the earthly paradise is a model of parental care. The fledgling, you know, Adam is the son of God, right? That’s what the gospel is called. The fledgling, the son of God is sheltered but not smothered.

On all sides, discoveries and encounters await him to draw out his powers of discernment and choice and scientific advancement. And there is ample nourishment for his esthetic values as well as his physical and spiritual appetites. So what we see in the text that we just read is a series of things that are important for us as people, important to look at as a model for parenting and a way we could say of doing job training as well.

So for instance in Genesis 2, God provides this environment for him and then God begins to specifically do things and what he does first of all is he gives him a job, right? He tells Adam to tend and keep the garden. So you know we give kids tasks and God gave Adam a task in the garden. Now that task will extend over the world. The rivers are mentioned just before this. Rivers are like highways, superhighways. You know, that’s where you’re going to travel fast and Adam will go down and find that gold. But he starts with a job training program in the garden. So he trains him on how to do the kind of work that will be effective in the broader world by giving him this task of tending and keeping the garden. That means to guard the garden and also to grow it into more beauty and more delight as well as usability for the created order.

So, it’s kind of a two-fold task to guard and nourish, right? To keep growing and developing as well as guard what’s there from whatever might harm it. And of course, he fails in that guarding task and we have the fall of man into sin. But in any event, those are kind of the two tasks. And it’s interesting that those two tasks permeate out throughout the Bible. If you look at the priest in the temple, those same two tasks, those same two words are used relative to the priest in the temple.

He keeps things sanctified and then he uses those things in the work of the temple. The temple is like a cosmos—a miniature model of the cosmos or the garden. And so we have these same two tasks given to the priests. And when we get around to for instance in Ephesians where we talk about husbands and wives, you know this is Steven’s job. Steven got married yesterday, took on a new task. And part of his task is to cherish his wife, right?

Which means to in the New Testament Greek to guard her like a way a mother hen would guard her chicks, to cherish her and also to love her and to bring her to development. And both parties really husbands and wives do that with each other. We have a guarding function and we have a nourishing function. The purpose of marriage is sanctification and growth. And so whether it’s the workplace or whether it’s the religious devices that God puts in place, whether it’s the home—you know we have these same two basic functions.

So first of all God gives his son a task and it’s a task in a small environment, controlled environment, but it will train him for what he’s going to do in the broader environment. Secondly then God commands him. Okay so God provides for the boundaries that we all are to have by imaging him, by giving him a command. And so, you know, with our kids, we’re kind of given commands. And as we prepare for work, we’re given commands about that work. They may be explicit or implicit, but they give us a form and kind of boundaries to what we’re to do and not do in a particular calling.

So, first we have assignment of small work preparing us for big work. Secondly, we have boundaries established for our work and what we’re to do. We live in that context. And this third thing then is God gives him a helper to help him to do his work. So work is not to be done in isolation. Ultimately work is done in community. And so in verse 18, God says that man shouldn’t be alone. I’m going to make him a helper. And that word helper is a strong word. God is a helper—same word used later in the Bible. So he’s going to give him a strong person to do work with him and to actually do more work in other directions. So God’s going to create human community through marriage and procreation. And that community will continue this job training with their children.

Then they’ll train them for work. They’ll give them commands. They’ll give them boundaries. And they’ll call them also to do more work. Now, it’s interesting because at this point in the story in verse 18, God’s going to give him a wife and then we have an account of God or Adam naming the animals and then we get to God’s provision of the wife. And so one of the things the naming of the animals does is it teaches God teaches his son his need for a wife by observing the animals.

And you all heard this, right? It’s an important lesson both in parenting and in job training to show people their need through unique and kind of interesting ways to help mature them and develop them not just by didactic instruction all the time but through work that accomplishes a broader purpose. We all know that. But I want to also point out that this tells us a lot of other things. You know, Genesis—well, actually all the Bible—is, but particularly in Genesis, you know, every time you read it practically, you’re going to see a little bit something new.

You’re going to think about implications that weren’t there. It is this kind of huge narrative that tells us some really layers and layers of stuff. And it seems to me that in this kind of job training program for Adam, God puts Adam in contact with the animal world. You know, he—it’s okay, first of all, obviously—to it’s a scientific task, right? So he’s got to observe the animals. He’s going to use his intellectual capacities.

And as we do with our kids, as we raise them, we increase their intellectual capacities. We train them. We stretch them. And we do that. And in job training, it’s the same thing. We prepare people for more work. We give them new tasks, greater responsibilities. So certainly you have that going on and our vocations have an intellectual component to them, right? But you know this—I also as I thought about this time actually I thought about Chris W., one of the pastors here and he’s a vet and what does his work mean in terms of the kingdom of God or culture?

Well, he very directly is involved with animals and observing them and understanding things about them in terms of ill health or problems, whatever it is. And then knowing how to fix a particular kind of animal. Well, that’s what Adam is doing here, right? He looks at each animal. He uses discernment and he takes on a god-like capacity of naming. God has already named things, the day and the night, right?

God names things but and he can name all these animals, but he doesn’t want to do it. He wants to train his son to do it, right? And so, his son takes on this task. And this is a task that will involve meditation, discernment, intellectual use of course it’ll involve the language that he was given. It involves a wide variety of components to this task. And it involves a relational aspect to the created world that will then I think permeate through human history.

We get down to the book of James that we just preached on and we see that man has tamed every beast in the world. Right? So you have this interaction with the animal world and there’s not a darned thing wrong with having pets and animals. And in fact, it seems like it’s kind of the created pattern, kind of a normal thing. You don’t have to, but actually, what’s one of the first tasks you give a child as they begin to develop and mature? At least in our household, it’s feeding the cats, right? It’s caring for the animals. It’s having a relationship with them that isn’t coercive and just domination and isn’t also letting them run wild necessarily. It’s interacting with them. At least particular animals—very significant I think in terms of the development of humanity its relationship to these animals that are made on the same day as we’re made. You know, animals are significant.

When we looked at the flood accounts—when the movie Noah came out and I preached a couple of sermons on it—you know God makes a covenant with the animals and what he does is certainly for humanity to redeem humanity but it’s also for the animals. And so the animals are in there with us, right?

So then we have this connection to them which gives real meaning and significance to people that are involved in vocational work relative to animals and it’s very much there. But in any event, so God uses this task of naming the animals that man engages himself in and then provides a helpmate, a strong helper to help Adam accomplish his mission. Right? That to fill the earth and to subdue it. And so he’s given this task by God.

He’s given a word to help him understand how to do that task in a way that’s productive. He’s given a set of increasingly difficult tasks in the small area that he was to work in preparing him for the broader world. And he’s given community—human society—to accomplish this as well. So all of these things are interesting things to meditate upon in terms of the overarching structure of the text.

And now I want to return to Genesis 1:26 and 27. And I want the rest of the sermon today to be talking about filling and forming and exercising of dominion. So Genesis 1:28 says, here’s your task. Be fruitful and multiply. Okay? So you’re going to do that and that’s part of filling the earth. So the first task is filling. The second task is subduing the earth. And we’ll talk about what that means. And then third, to have dominion over the earth. Now, it’s interesting that dominion can be seen as really doing the forming and filling thing, but it could be seen separately as well.

In the original creation in Genesis 1:2, we are told that the earth and its original created order, the world, the cosmos and its original created order is formless. It needs forming. It’s void. It needs filling. And it’s dark. It needs lights. And one way to think about God’s work, which is always a great meditation for our work in the creation week, is this is what God does, right? He forms things. And how he forms it is he takes things, divides them, makes particulars—individuality so to speak—out of just mass.

So he differentiates. So he kind of forms things into new things and he fills those things as well. So he forms right—the heavens sky and water and he forms the earth and then he fills those things right. So he puts lights in the heavens and he puts fish and birds in that realm and he puts man and beasts on the earth. So God is forming and filling and so when he tells Adam here to fill the earth and to subdue it we can connect up subduing the earth exercising creative assertive will in the context of the world with what God did with what he began with.

We’re given a world and then we start to change it—the way God changed what he originally created—bringing form. And so we’re filling the earth to bring form to the earth. And then God lights the earth, right? And the lights that he places in the earth are all on the fourth day, right? He fills the heavens with these sun, moon, and stars, and they’re rulers. And so lighting is kind of a ruling aspect of what God does.

He creates rulers to rule for him, right? And so when we read this text in Genesis 1:27, 28 rather, and God tells Adam to fill the earth and to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion over the earth. This three-fold pattern really picks up on what God has already done in forming, filling, and lighting. So that’s kind of the an overarching view of the thing. Now, the filling thing is interesting. And we’ll talk first about filling and then forming filling.

So, they’re to fill the earth. Now it’s interesting that many commentators have pointed out and I think I mentioned this last week that the other creation creatures they just multiply. God tells them to multiply. They go about all of that and that’s just what they do. But for man, filling procreation is given for a specific purpose of subduing and exercising dominion—doing this cultural mandate, doing the dominion mandate is directly tied to the command to fill the earth.

And so human procreation has intentionality to complete the task that God has assigned to us as rulers under him to subdue the earth to bring out its potential. So for us, you know, it’s different. It’s also very different because as soon as we start to talk about filling the earth and man and wife and procreation, we’re talking about the development of a human civilization or culture. Right? So what will happen now is the earth which has just one person then two we’ll have a whole you know billions and billions of people eventually. So what Adam is being told to do is in the filling command is to create a civilization—create a human society. That’s what’s going to happen. And the world will be changed by that human society as that human society goes about its work of subduing the earth of forming it of making differentiations, tearing things apart, making new things out of them and bringing increased beauty and drawing the potential of the earth.

But that happens because it’s a human civilization. It doesn’t happen in isolation. And so that is one of the factors involved in filling—this creation of community—human civilization. And as I said earlier, the filling thing happens right after a description of the rivers. And so clearly if we’re going to fill the earth, they’re going to use those rivers to go downstream to different areas and develop those areas.

And in fact, we’re immediately told that one of those lands has gold. And so clearly, Adam is going to take the vision of what God has shown him in the garden. He’s going to take that early job training stuff. He’s going to go down that river and he’s going to find that gold. Now, the gold won’t be easy to find necessarily, right? God has it hidden away. It takes work and a lot of it. But he’s going to find that gold and bring it to development.

He’s going to make beautiful things ultimately even items in the temple and tabernacle itself. He’s going to bring the created order in tribute to God in beautified forms. That’s what we do in our work. So, filling has this idea to it. I want to mention one other thing about filling and that is that you know as you those of us who have entered into marriage we know that filling the earth—getting married and having children—is a call to work.

You know, it’s not just you don’t just fall off the log and everything’s great and everything works out. Human procreation happens, and I wasn’t sure if I should talk about this. I’m going to. Human procreation happens through tremendous intimacy of two imagebarers of God. There was this stupid song years ago, “let’s do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel.” Impossible for us. We’re created in the image of God.

Human community is formed as it were in the relationship—the community that exists between a husband and wife—and one of the most intimate elements of that—the most intimate element we could say—is the development of the future children. So the filling task requires a whole bunch of other tasks to fulfill right. Chris did premarital counseling with Stephen and Rachel. I don’t know if you did it via Skype, Google, whatever it is, or how much they had in person, but that’s kind of what we do is prepare them for that. You have creating that human community. It’s not a task to be entered into lightly or unadvisedly or without some degree of training. So even in the filling aspect, the thing that might seem most natural—just have a bunch of kids—no, the creation of human community requires training, right?

Adam’s being trained in a garden. Couples get trained through premarital counseling how to, you know, go into a life together, a shared life together that will usually eventuate in children. So, filling is this first task that God calls Adam to do in verse 28. And the second task is to subdue the earth. Now, this is an odd word. If you do a quick word study in Hebrew in the Old Testament, every other place where this is used, it’s talking about subduing enemies. Okay? It means conquering. It means subduing ISIS, right? That’s what it’s talking about. Now, it’s odd because this is a command given before the fall. So, the world is not fallen and is not going to have thorns going on yet. Thistles, no—it’s going to be, it will yield its fruit so to speak to mankind. But still this word subduing is used. Why? Well, I think because it’s an initial statement to us of the difficulty of the task.

Just because the world is not adversarial to us, it doesn’t mean the task is going to be easy. This word subdue means there’s a real assertion of will involved in terms of the vocations that we exercise in the world to bring out its potential. And that’s what’s being talked about here. You know when God—the image here again the model is God. How does he subdue the earth? He grabs a—he takes a hold of things. He takes a hold of some dirt and rips it out, forms a little birdie out of it. Puts it up in the air. As he formed the birds out of the ground with man. He rips a hole in his side, pulls out, you know, a rib with some flesh attached from which he forms a woman. Then he closes up the side, right? I mean, it’s—I wouldn’t want to call it violent, but it kind of is. It’s the real assertion of God’s will on the created material order of things to improve it, to develop it, to bring out its potentiality.

And so, if we look at God as the model and we’re told that we’re to not just fill the earth but to subdue it as well. And we see this as God’s—we’re doing this as God’s imagebarers who will be dominion men and women right—to exercise dominion over the earth to be rulers for God—vice regents under him right—little kings under the big king—that we’re to do this by really tough work subduing the earth—so all difficulty and work is not the result of the fall. We’ll talk more about this next month but part of it is just work is difficult.

It’s called work because it’s work. And that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Work is good for us. And what I think the text is telling us about here is bringing out the potentiality of the earth. And that can be difficult. You know, the problem here is that some people think that we’re just to kind of coexist with the earth, don’t change it, try not to change it as much as we can. The view of mankind in relationship to the creator—or as a caretaker who doesn’t really change anything. He just leaves it the way it is. But God’s description of what God is giving us here is we’re to be stewards, trustees. And you remember in the parables, if Jesus entrusted somebody with a certain amount of talent, he wanted more than that when he returned. He didn’t just want it put under the ground and then returned to him. The same thing’s true with the created order. We’re to bring out potentiality.

So radical environmentalism is wrong. On the other hand, radical exploitation of the earth is wrong as well. Clearly, we’re subduing this under the command of God. God gives us commands and it’s his imagebarers. And God has already told us that what we’re going to do in the broader world is guarding, but also bringing out the potentiality of the garden, nourishing it, nurturing it, bringing it up, making it grow better and bigger. So it’s not to destroy it, right? It’s not to pave it over all of it necessarily. So between these two extremes of radical exploitation of the earth and caretaker vision of what we do, the Bible says it’s this other thing going on where we subdue the earth. Real assertion of will is used and we do that as imagebarers of God for his purposes, as trustees who develop the world into better and better things.

So, uh Genesis 1 gives us that kind of thing to do work. The word for subdue here—the word to work the world so to speak—is a strong assertive word that talks about the assertion of our will over or upon the created order but done for the purpose that God has established us here for—to bring the potentiality and beauty of the created order. And next week we’ll talk about the essential aspect of service in work as well.

So the earth has this tremendous potentiality—the same way the original created order did. Just like God brings it to its development, we’re to bring it to its development as well. We are to be culture builders. In other words, we make the world a more beautiful place both aesthetically and in terms of productivity and we make it good for other people. And so this is the building of human culture. So our work ultimately has this idea to it of building human culture.

Keller in his book quotes a philosopher named Al Wallers who said this: “The earth had been completely unformed and empty. In the six-day process of development, God had formed it and filled it, but not completely. People must now carry on the work of development. By being fruitful, they fill it even more. By subduing it, they must form it even more. As God’s representatives, we carry on where God left off. But this is now to be a human development of the earth. The human race will fill the earth with its own kind, and it will form the earth for its own kind. From now on, the development of the created earth will be societal and cultural in nature.”

Societal and cultural in nature. We are to be those that develop culture and develop human society. Keller talks about the application of this to farmers and I guess we could say to Adam and Eve in the original garden, but also to all farmers. He says this: “They do not leave the land as it is. They rearrange it in order to make it most fruitful to draw the potentialities out for growth and development, to do this out of the soil. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind, a purpose in mind, with intentionality we could say. They rearrange the raw materials of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, beauty. And that is the pattern for all work, right?”

That’s the pattern for all work. It is creative and assertive. It is rearranging the raw materials of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general and people in particular thrive and flourish. Now, that’s what you do. If this is what the Bible describes and we’ve created these jobs to work as God’s imagebarers, what he just described is what you do. You make human culture. You make societal progress. You make beautiful spaces. You make a world that glorifies God increasingly more and more and results in our enjoyment of God as we enjoy the created order increasingly brought to its potentiality, beauty and delight.

Keller goes on to talk about this application in all work. This pattern is found in all kinds of work. Farming takes the physical material of soil and seed and produces food. Music takes the physics of sound and rearranges it into something beautiful and thrilling that brings meaning to life. When we take fabric we can make a new piece of clothing. When we push a broom and clean up a room. When we use technology to harness the forces of electricity. When we take an unformed or naive human mind and teach it a subject. When we teach a couple how, as Chris did, teach a couple how to resolve relational disputes or how to prepare for marriage. When we take simple materials and turn them into a poignant work of art, we are continuing God’s work of forming, filling, and subduing.

Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and unfold creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development. And then he points out that culture actually comes from the word cultivate. And so Adam was a cultivator that would build a culture, a human society, as he moves forward. Keller tells the story of an artisanal jam company—I’m not sure what that means. Jams that are made really good, I suppose—but a company where a guy, I think a member of Redeemer, decided to for I don’t know what his connections were to Armenia, but Armenia has this great fruit, but it was a seasonal business and all kinds of the fruit would rot and be spoiled, etc. So, this man decided to create a jam company in Armenia so that he could turn it into a year-round productive venture.

They could use all the fruit that God had grown for them, right, and developed on the trees or that their labor had developed, so they wouldn’t waste anywhere near as much as they used to. And at the same time, he’d bring wonderful taste and delight to people as they eat jam on toast. And he created this company. Now, when you do that kind of thing, you’re doing exactly what we’re talking about and what God has revealed for us in Genesis 2. You’re building culture. You’re taking the created order and bringing more potentiality out of it, right? That’s what you’re doing. And a big part of that is human society.

I don’t know the difficulties this man had in Armenia, but I heard a similar story after the devastation of Haiti years ago about a man who had tried and tried and tried to make Haiti more productive in terms of whatever its agricultural produce was. And what you heard in that story was that this was not just a matter of saying, “Oh, people do this, store things this way, we’ll transport them and logistics will get better and we can keep fruit from rotting and store it in your homes in this way.” No, it doesn’t work that way. People have long established patterns in these countries of how they do things. And it’s not easy for them to break those kind of patterns, nor do they necessarily understand all the things you’re trying to communicate to them.

So the point is when you try to make the world a better place and produce more productivity for fruits in Armenia, you inevitably end up maturing people as well, right? Creating human culture and civilization to a bigger extent than when you began the process. You make people better at what they’re doing. That’s the only way to make profits or products rather—that’ll fill the world in a productive way.

This man when he created this preserve company—what’s it called? Harvest Song. Harvest Song. When he—one of the—he said he had an epiphany as he was meditating on these texts that we were looking at from Genesis 1 and 2. And he had this epiphany. He said, “God doesn’t make junk. So God creates things and it’s all very good.” And then we’re to create things. And he said, “God didn’t make junk and I don’t make junk. If I’m going to build this company, it’s not being a company that produces junk. It’s going to produce really good jam.” Right? So the idea of seeing our work lined up with God’s work changes what we do tomorrow when we go into the workplace. We’re not going to make junk. We’re not going to do half-baked jobs, right? We’re going to work hard. We’re going to be diligent at what we do. We’re going to be creative in what we do.

We’re going to draw out potentiality because God doesn’t make junk and we don’t make junk either. So, we have these are some of the ways to think about how this development happens. He also tells the story of Fuller Seminary professor Richard Mao addressing a group of bankers at a conference and he told him to look at Genesis 1 and 2 and think of God as an investment banker who does particular things. He leverages what he has developed. He creates new ways of leveraging that the value of the initial world and bring it more and more value and then he creates business partners, right? Adam and Eve and those people. And so if you begin to think about what God does in more directly vocational terms that you may be involved with, it’s a big help to help us to understand what is it that we’re supposed to do at work.

I’m glad. It’s great. I’m glad it’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I feel guilty for not looking at it that way, but what do I do now when I get up tomorrow morning and go to work? Well, let me tell you a little bit to make this even more applicable. This basic truth of subduing—so whenever a wedding comes around, you always think of your own wedding. And I was thinking of Christine and I and the year that we spent prior to our marriage. Here’s what I did.

I went to Multnomah School of the Bible for a year, full-time student. Okay? And so I was developing my knowledge of scripture. And I did. I worked as a clerk at a 7-Eleven. I cleaned the Swiss Echo, which was a little restaurant in Beaverton close to where we lived. I cleaned Christine and I actually cleaned it. Christine and I cleaned a flower shop in that same little strip mall and we also were the janitors of the church. We cleaned the church every Saturday to get it ready for worship.

I did all that at the same time. Had all those jobs going on. In addition, I was actively involved in building my relationship with her. Those are the things that I did. The one thing I didn’t do a lot of was sleep. But what about those tasks? These are the sort of tasks that you’ve probably done in the past or are making to be doing now.

Take our job cleaning the Swiss Echo. What was the Swiss Echo? Well, it was this little restaurant from people that had some roots to Switzerland. And they wanted to create wonderful good tasting Swiss food for people in this small space in a strip mall. And you know, it’s kind of Swiss themed and all this stuff. And what Christine and I did is we helped create the kind of environment that people would want to come to, not a dirty environment, but a clean environment. And we helped to keep the kitchen clean and stuff so that the food would be tasty and not bad. Christine and I were a part of the work, the vision of those husband and wife owners of this business to create a beautiful space with beautiful, tasty food. We were a part of that, an essential part of that. If nobody cleans the Swiss Echo, it’s not a beautiful place to eat. And if nobody cleans the kitchen of the Swiss Echo, the food is not tasty and nourishing at all, right?

It begins to exhibit bad problems that the people would be closed down the restaurant for. So that simple job, a janitor’s job, right, helped create a space of beauty for other people. It created culture. It was part of the production of culture, right? And the—of culture. That restaurant hadn’t been there before. Couple first thought it up. Let’s do this. Let’s bring more value to the people in Beaverton. Let’s make this cute nice restaurant they can go to.

Flower shops the same way. You know, a wedding yesterday. Flowers. Where did the flowers come from? They come from a flower shop. And how does that flower shop maintain itself as a business productively and with beauty and delivering great fresh flowers? How do they do that? Well, among other things, they have a janitor. They’ve got somebody like Christine and I cleaning up everything, you know, and making the place work better.

So, in some small way, Christine, in very small way perhaps, but a significant way, if you think of what’s happening with Adam and Eve and what God has called us to do, in a very significant way, we’re bringing culture. We’re bringing beauty to weddings or funerals or whatever it is, to husbands and wives celebrating their anniversaries or just celebrating together. We’re helping to bring beauty to the world, which will enhance human attitudes and perspectives on weddings and funerals and relationships.

And we’re doing that through the simple task of keeping the place clean. A necessary task. If that’s not done, the business can’t continue. The flowers won’t be sold and the culture will be diminished to a certain extent. We clean the church. You know, David cleans this church. He prepares a worship space. If you came here today and there were bulletins from last week lying all over and a bunch of dirt on the floor and you know these chairs were just all cockeyed, you know, you wouldn’t really be able to relax like you can in a clean place and worship God in beauty and you’d know somehow that in spite of what the sermon said, we don’t really believe it at this church because the sanctuary is a wreck, right?

So in some small way, you know, church janitors and church arrangers—Christine helps arrange all of this as well. You know, they add to what is the height of culture making—the culture making endeavor and which spurns or spawns—gets going all culture—spurs it on. I mean the worship of the triune God who’s called us to be his imagebarers by filling and subduing and being his rulers in the earth. So very small tasks.

The sort of small tasks that some of you are involved with but significant tasks right now. After those years, I got married then and when I got married, I began a new job. I started working at a place called Oregon Manufacturing and the Paulit Corporation and I was the purchasing agent and they had a production line making rental yard tillers, big Mantis rotor tillers for the rental industry and you know, so I would place orders and call people and they would send these parts and then the production lines could continue and the tillers would go out the door and some of you if you’re older ones might have rented a Mantis tiller and you made your yard more beautiful or you made a vegetable garden by using a rented tiller and I contributed to that. I was part of that, right?

And what all I’m trying to do is show you the significance of any job. I just took all the jobs God happened to give me. Now the next job I had as our marriage continued and I developed was the purchasing agent at the Oregon Graduate Center. Now there at the Oregon Graduate Center, it’s where I met John S. at the Gordon Graduate Center. High level research going on, but a lot of it directly related to Northwest businesses. I I was the purchasing agent. So I bought petri dishes and this and that. And I bought gas chromatography mass spectrometer systems, the kind that Tom D’s been working on for decades, the kind that newer models that Scott C. is involved in building out at Shimadzu.

So complicated instruments and simple things. I bought everything they needed. And one of the research projects was the cloning of conifers, right? This was the first days, you know, this is long time ago, the first days of the cloning of trees for the wood product industry that would provide a lot of value in years to come. And so I—it was. I don’t remember. It was a Crown Zellerbach had another project there to experiment in biological pulping of paper or of wood rather to make paper because it’s difficult getting the lignin I think it’s called out of it. So these were processes. There was another group working on laser distance instruments for sawmills. The opening days of using lasers to measure a log for productive most efficient ways to cut it. Also measuring the saw blades to see when they needed to be replaced etc. Another group in the physics department was working on lasers—various laser projects. Well, not just that applied one but another one was involved in the creation of a company called Identify EE and they created lasers that would scan your eyeball and identify who you were so you could have access to whatever it was. I actually had my eye scanned. It’s probably what gave me my eye problems. Probably why I’m blind today.

Now, now the point is each one of those endeavors created more industry and it created more Christian culture and civilization in this country as a result of all those business-funded research projects. And I was a small part of that. If I didn’t get the stuff for them, they couldn’t do the work that day. That Chinese female scientist that we brought over to clone conifers, she couldn’t do it. She didn’t have petri dishes. It’s that simple. So, I was part of all of that. Right now, now what I’m trying to do is not, you know, boast. I’m doing the opposite. I’m trying to show you the most simple jobs that I was given. Then I got more interesting jobs and I got to be around a little more interesting people and stuff going on at the graduate center. But it’s all the same thing. I’m not bragging about what I did. I’m trying to give you a sense, and which I’m sure most of you already have, but I’m trying to drive home a sense of the significance of what you do in the workplace, right?

This is what happens. How did that wedding happen yesterday without some manual labor going on putting knobs on soundboards at a production factory or soldering or whatever it is they do or stamping out metal. You don’t get the music yesterday that enhances or the sound system that enhances the beauty and joy of the wedding and the reception. You can go on and on and on. The beautiful dress that the bride wears came from fabric that people developed out of raw materials or created new synthetic materials and people woven and designers played applied their trade and did what they did and the end result is joy in a wedding.

All right, I could go on and on. I hope you get the point. It’s kind of obvious, I suppose, but our task of exercising dominion in the world is not primarily about who we’re going to vote for in three weeks. I’m writing a voter’s guide as usual. It is that. But that’s not it. These texts from Genesis tell us that they tell us that the dominion we’re to have in the earth is a result of filling the earth, creating human civilization and subduing the earth, creating human culture that develops and builds upon the beauty, the functionality and the human and the flourishing of humanity and of the created order as well.

This is who we are, you know. What if work is not tangential to the mission of God? Is the question I heard at that conference four or five years ago. What if what you do tomorrow morning, whether you’re staying at home cleaning the house, taking care of kids, teaching kids, going off to write code, or going off to push a broom somewhere. What if that work, not as a way of witnessing to people—yeah, there’s that, too. But what if that work itself is not tangential to the mission of God in the world, but is the mission of God in the world. We’re brought through salvation back to right relationship as children of God to do what he originally called us to do. And the mission of God is to do that thing tomorrow. Whether you’re on an assembly line selling burgers at McDonald’s, writing some of the most wonderful new artificial intelligence code that could be thought of.

Whatever it is we do, you see these callings that God has given to us. I want you to understand, I want you to be encouraged that when you get up tomorrow morning, you’re going off to be and do the mission of God in the world. Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you, Father, for the new eyes they give us on our vocations. Bless us, Father, with a proper response to this incredible privilege that we have of working as your mission in the world. Bless us each, Lord God, as we connect up the seemingly irrelevant things we may think that we do to the wonderful overarching plan and development of human culture and civilization. In Jesus name we pray this and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.